Sorry, Angel
by Andi Mack
Summary: Otacon arrives back home to Sunny and Snake after being imprisoned for two months and nearly beaten to death. Despite the trauma, he tries to return to normal life. MGS4 spoilerish. Some crude but non-explicit sexual themes.
1. Part 1

_Believe it or not, this started out as a very simple story. I had actually laid out the plot for __**Solid Snake's Soldier**__ in less than 30 lines and 10 minutes over messenger. But somehow, I started writing and it started to develop into something that needed notes at the end!_

_I think I was going for a world record for this story: Which character can cry the most without getting dehydrated. It's got drama and tears...and even a few super natural elements. Sorry if the backstory stuff is a little sloppy...I'm not used to writing stuff with plots!_

_**Note:** In case you're wondering, yes, I did upload this and deleted it a few hours later. Sorry, subscribers. I didn't realize how long 9,730 words was until I saw it all jumbled together. So, I deleted it, split it into two parts, and reuploaded it. This way is much more enjoyable, trust me._

* * *

Hal felt the hands on his body and opened his eyes this time only to get a look at the person's face. Not to fight, resist, or even remember it. All of that was pointless. The hands would do whatever they wanted to him anyway and find the few places on his body that didn't wear a bruise already. His body was desensitized to the beating. At least he wouldn't give them the pleasure of feeling anything. He just wanted it to be quick. He went through the motions of every hit that struck the numbness hoping one of them would rupture something vital and end his suffering. But he knew the will to see his angel again was the reason he was still alive. The only reason.

His sudden realization that the faces of his captors were passing by in a veil of crimson hurried his focus on the face of his carrier.

"S...S...Snake?"

"Hi, Hal." His voice flowed as smoothly and carefree as his movements were.

"You...you came..."

"I'm sorry it took so long."

"How... long?"

"Two months." He finally said, clearly disappointed in himself for such the long time frame.

"Doesn't matter...you're here. Thank you, Snake..."

In the next motion, Hal was looking up at the clear skies of Europe. He squinted at the severe onslaught of sunlight and wind that was being kicked up by the helicopter rotors he heard. They passed quickly under them and Hal felt his body pass into the grip of a woman. He shifted his gaze to her petite outline and collected her darkened features covered in a trademark concern.

"My God...what did they do to you, Hal?"

"He's in pretty bad shape. We need to get him out of here, Mei Ling." Snake urged, climbing into the aircraft. His body hacked with a few coughs but only enough to be blamed on dust to anyone else. Hal knew differently, though.

With that, the outline disappeared from his eye line and into the control chair of the helicopter. Hal's head finally connected everything that was happening and he pushed out the one name from his heart that mattered to him.

"Sunny..."

"She's waiting on you back home. Save your strength and don't talk. We have a long ride back to the States."

Hal tried to nod in agreement with Snake and closed his eyes when he felt the ground they were on carelessly floating away.

He was going home.

He was going to see his angel.

* * *

Sunny sat down next to Hal once again in the tiny bit of sofa in front of him. He hadn't moved since Snake had laid him there a few hours before. She patted his arm softly for the umpteenth time to confirm his actuality. He was there. Weary and damaged...but alive. Her heart had broken when she first looked at him as he was being carried through the door by Snake. He had lost against the fatigue at some point and shared the physics of an aging rag doll as he had been lowered onto the sofa. While watching him, in her less confident moments, she had put her hand in front of mouth and nose to make sure she was able to feel him breathe.

His body bumped into hers in a subtle stir from behind and Sunny moved to kneel next to him.

"Uncle Hal?" she called to him in an attempt to rush him into a conscious state. His eyes focused and softly landed on her face.

"Hi, angel."

She had missed hearing him call her that and had gone a full two months without it. Two full months without _him_.

"I missed you so much!" She rushed a hug around him forgetting the pain the rest of his body may be experiencing. He cared even less about it and he gripped her back with the small amount of strength he had regenerated in his short rest.

"I missed you, too, Sunny. I missed you so, so much. I thought about you every day, you know that?" She nodded with her head on his shoulder and responded in an outpour of emotion that caused Hal to hold her closer to him. "You kept me alive. I knew I had to see you again. I owe you my life." Sunny pulled back to look at him. The tears in her eyes influenced the well of the ones in his own.

"You don't owe me anything, Uncle Hal. I'm just happy you're home." In a sudden remembrance, she got up fetched a slender but colorful bouquet of flowers from a vase on the other side of the room. She handed them to him. "These are for you."

He smiled. "Are these from your garden?"

She nodded, a bit ashamed. "I'm sorry there's not more. I wanted it to be bigger but everything stopped growing while you were gone. I guess the flowers missed you as much as I did."

"They're perfect, Sunny. Thank you."

Hal struggled to lift himself to sit up but the fatigue that resonated through out his body still proved to be too much and kicked his attempt out from under him.

"You shouldn't try and get up. You haven't been resting for very long. Snake hasn't even gotten back with your medications yet."

"I feel like all I've been doing lately is laying down." Sunny reluctantly helped him into position when she saw him try again and after a moment, he rescanned her last words in his head. "Snake went out to get medicines for me? Did he take me to the hospital?"

"I don't think so. Rosemary wrote them and sent them here for Snake to get."

Hal couldn't help but look relieved. How many people knew about what had happened to him? Had Snake found out? What was he going to say to him? His slight panic subsided when he heard the mercenary's footsteps enter the room. Hal noted the white paper bag in his hand as he watched him sit it down in front of him.

"How are you feeling, Hal?"

He let the cool concern that could only be pulled off by Snake seep into him before answering. He was the only one who could tell when he was truly worried and not just making conversation with a question like that.

"Like my head is going to explode."

"Well, I think your presents from Rose should fix that." He opened the bag and read each label as he took out the bottles. "Vicodin, Valium, and...Zoloft." he said a bit to his own surprise.

"I guess she thought of everything. Only thing missing is a full time medic in case I try to off myself."

"'Off yourself'? What does that mean, Uncle Hal?"

"It means nothing, Sunny. I was just making a really bad joke."

Snake's hand landed firmly on his shoulder. "You're going to be fine, Hal."

"I know."

"I'm going to take really good care of you and I'm going to get you anything you need." Sunny declared, "Snake says the walls in this house are paper thin so I'll be able to hear you call me from wherever I am. I'm going to do whatever it takes to get you well again, Uncle Hal."

"I know you will, angel."

"Well," Snake said, shaking his head lightly as if to shake invisible cobwebs, "I'm sure Sunny has a ton of stuff she wants to catch you up on. I'll be around if you need anything." Sunny noticed the slight unsteadiness in his first few steps and jumped to her feet when he barely caught his body weight in the door way.

"Snake! Are you--"

"I'm fine. I'm just exhausted."

"You're still sick. You're going to kill yourself if you keep this up."

"Hal needs you, Sunny. Worry about him."

"What about you? Who's going to worry about you?"

Snake pushed himself off the wall and used it as a brace until he was sure he support his own weight again. He could feel Sunny's eyes on him, scrutinizing every step he took as he left the room. Once he knew he was out of her watch, he took the wall for support once more. This was the way it had been last time before his body completely shut down on him. Small signs that equaled the severity of flu symptoms. A small stagger here, a brief moment of weakness there--all until it caught up with him and lunged onto him with the kinetic force of a freight train. He had tricked death once into passing him by, he knew he couldn't do it again. No one was that good. Not even him.

* * *

"You know, this should be the other way around."

Hal smiled at Sunny as she put the sandwich and milk down in front of him at the table. At that moment, the only thing that reminded him that she was a child was the nightclothes she was wearing—a long pink nightgown sprinkled in little sleeping moons and stars. At 3am, it had been _her_ comforting him from a nightmare and _her_ suggesting that they go to the kitchen so that she could make them sandwiches. A part of him felt completely worthless as he looked at Sunny. She was 7 years old with no friends her age and nothing but him and a dying soldier to call her family. But, she treated him and Snake like gold and went about her imposed responsibilities with a great seriousness and care. If her situation bothered her in least, she never showed it or told.

"I remember you doing this for me when I was a kid and had a nightmare." She reminded him as she climbed into the chair next to him.

"Yeah, but that's my job. And you still _are_ a kid, Sunny. You should be making paper hearts for the boy you like in class or having slumber parties. Not doing this."

"What's wrong with taking care of you and Snake?" she asked curiously and chewed the second bite of her sandwich. To her, that was as normal as anything Hal had mentioned.

He shook his head. "Nothing. I don't know what me or Snake would do without you, angel."

Sunny stared down at the stretch of table between them, her face deep with a worry far beyond her years.

"He's getting worse, ya know."

"I know. I could see he was deteriorating when he came to Europe for me. He was only a few coughs away from it being a mission to rescue him."

"I tried to get him to send Raiden for you but, he said it was his fault for not protecting you and his responsibility to bring you back."

Hal shook his head. "That's not true. It wasn't his fault. It was mine. I knew they had our number...I just thought we were too good to get caught. I guess when you've narrowly escaped situations as much as me and Snake have over the years it's easy to fool yourself into a false sense of immortality. Maybe those guys had every right to do what they did to me."

"What did they do to you, Uncle Hal?"

Hal smiled softly and reached over to touch her face.

"Nothing you need to worry about, angel. It's all over now."

"But...they must have done something terrible to you. You had a nightmare about it."

"Yes, and do you know why? It was because I dreamt they told me that I'd never see you again...and that's the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to me."

Sunny bit her bottom lip in dissatisfaction of his decision to put such a sugary coating on his nightmare for her now. She had watched him earlier as he begged and pleaded to an invisible enemy for his suffering to end and been there to provide an embrace for him as he sobbed out nearly incoherent apologies for only God knows what on her shoulder. When they were both finished, she cleared the table and washed the dishes they had used, silently creating every scenario in which all the bruises and wounds she had seen on Hal could have gotten there. She felt like smashing anything that was breakable when she thought of anyone hurting him in any way.

When she looked back in on him in the dinning room, he was asleep. Left arm extended across the table serving as a pillow, right arm tucked into his chest. Sunny couldn't imagine the position being very comfortable, but she was happy to see him calmed and with a low snore exiting on his exhales. After she successfully retrieved his glasses from his face, the bruises and cuts they had been covering made her insides knot. With a subtle shift, Hal's shirt uncovered just enough of his side for Sunny to realize the bruises weren't only on his face. She gently lifted his shirt and revealed a deep purple band of flesh that wrapped around to his stomach. He hadn't even hinted to her that his time away had resulted in injuries like that and she knew that had been intentional now. Had Snake even examined him? Did he know the damage they had done? When she placed her hand over Hal's stomach, it tingled with the sensation of the blunt object that had been rammed repeatedly into that spot and it materialized into a jolt of pain in that area on her own body. When she touched his back, she could hear the sound of make shift batons crashing down unmercifully onto his spine. And when she touched his chest, she felt the warmness left behind by the angry flesh that had impacted with his. Tears stained her cheeks as she brought her hand to his face. On immediate contact, images flowed in a furious blur of colors, distorted snapshots, and screams that had come from Hal's own anguish and pain. Nothing stood still long enough for her to see anything definite but the ferocity of the whirling happening in her own head told her the events had happened in much of the same fashion for him. Her hand jerked away and she crumbled in a pile next to his chair. She wanted to scream until her lungs exploded and her heart stopped. The tiny pins of agony that rippled over her skin made her want to rip it off. But everything amounted to nothing more than more hot tears running down her face, more uncontrollable sobs for her Uncle Hal.

"Sunny?" Hal brought his hand down on top of her head, encouraging her to look up at him. "What's wrong?"

"I'm sorry they hurt you so badly, Uncle Hal."

"That pain is mine. I never wanted you to feel any of it."

"I wanted to take it away from you." she admitted.

Hal urged Sunny to him. He felt that for a moment, he had regained the role of adult as he wiped her tears away with his hand.

"You don't have to do that. I promise you it doesn't hurt now, angel," he told her, "not anymore."

* * *

Snake caught himself on the edge of a counter top when he felt his legs giving away right from under him. His head still whirled and his ears still rang from the sudden and violent outburst of coughing in the stillness of the house. As he fought to catch his breath, balance, and anything else that had escaped him in the moment, he felt a small hand rest on his back.

"I'm fine, Sunny."

"You're not taking care of yourself, Snake. I know you're not."

She was right and he didn't have his train of thought or air back in his lungs yet to argue with her.

Sunny didn't look at Snake the same way she had two months ago. She couldn't. Especially when she saw him like that.

When Hal had been gone, it had just been them for the first time ever. In that time, she had seen Snake be his own unique version of an emotional mess. Bouts of crying and sadness for a normal person were replaced by sessions of quiet meditation for Snake where he often looked as if he was in some other world, fighting off all the worst case scenarios that threatened to make their way into his thoughts. They both wanted the same thing and it forged a connection that Snake didn't remember existed until his body went into a spasmodic fit and he needed her. His pride and military mindset wouldn't let him admit when he did and very often, he fought the attentive care of her. But it was an act that never discouraged her. He was reckless and in the two slow months it took for his and Mei Ling's plan for Hal's rescue to come together, he practiced a level of it that only Sunny could dilute. He was a hazard to himself in the way he wanted to throw caution and plans to the wind and simply bogard his way into an unsafe situation but Sunny, with soft suggestions and tone, would remind him that that kind of behavior wouldn't do anyone any good. Even with Hal back, and safe, she could see he was still reckless and in, more or less, the same fashion.

"Hal needs you more than I do," he said.

"He's fine," she countered, "_He's_ resting. Like you should be."

Snake took what little stand was left in his legs and used them to move himself to the nearby sofa.

"With rest, Hal's going to get better." he told her, "I'm not." Her face quietly softened at the brash reminder. Snake still hadn't found his tone with Sunny and often times found himself being too blunt with her. "How is he?"

"He's...okay." she responded, surprised by the amount of concern he let slip through the words, "He's barely eating, though. I'm worried about him."

"I'm sure once Hal recovers a little more, he'll be more in an eating mood. Just give him some time. He's been through a lot."

"He was doing really good until the nightmares started. It's like he just...gave up."

"Some people deal with things differently. Maybe some days are better than others for him."

"Snake...who were the guys that did this to him? Why did they take him?"

He didn't quite know himself but the question took him back to a few days before when he saw Hal for the first time. At first when he approached him, he wasn't even sure it was him. Bruises and cuts covered much of his face, completely obliterating the child-like glow Snake had been used to seeing in him. And though amazingly he hadn't lost much weight, his body was fragile and clearly shattered by something evil. When he had touched Hal, he had flinched and not from the surprise of the contact...but out of pure fear. It had taken him several seconds to figure out the best way to pick him up without initiating a panic in him and less time than that to stop caring and decide to get him out of there the best way he could while he still had the chance.

"They did awful things to him, Sunny."

"Like what?"

"It's not important. He's safe now. Besides, I don't think it's anything your ears ever need to hear."

"Snake...please tell me. I promise I can handle it."

"I don't know exactly what they did to him, Sunny. Only the state I found him in. He won't talk about it."

"Then tell me what you know."

Snake questioned his own morals and scruples for giving into a 7-year-old's pleas for the details of the events and sighed. "After we destroyed GW, a lot of soldiers were left without a real direction or purpose left in life. It didn't take long for a small group of them to form a Resistance and begin to seek out the people responsible for their torment. It took them no time at all to successfully link the events back to us. Me, you, Hal, Mei Ling, Meryl—all of us. Hal and I knew they were out there, looking for us, but they covered their tracks well and we didn't try hard enough to catch their flaws. Looking back, maybe we even underestimated them a little bit. But, we knew what they wanted: the person responsible for the actual destruction of GW."

"But...but that was me! I finished the code that destroyed it. Why didn't they take me?!" she said almost regretful that they hadn't.

"When they found out how old you were, they thought it was a cover up, something we had set up to throw them off course. So, they went to down the line to Naomi and when they realized she was already dead, that lead them straight to Hal."

"So that's how they knew to get Hal on his way to visit Mei Ling. They were watching us!"

"Yes, they were watching us...but that trip was a set up. Mei Ling had never contacted Hal about visiting her. The email, the tickets for the flight...it was all a ruse to get Hal where they wanted him: without you or me to interfere."

In that moment, Snake took a new found joy in taking his knife and slicing it cleanly through the necks of every last Resistance member he had come in contact with on his way to find his friend. The blood on his hands and body that poured out from the openings he had made wasn't nearly enough to pay for what they had done to Hal but nothing ever would be in his eyes. The anger erupting in him suddenly triggered another violent attack of coughing and Sunny took the opportunity to firmly urge his body to lie down on the sofa. She kept her hand on him, feeling every jolting reverberation of his chest, until he calmed down. Again, he didn't fight her.

"Rest." she simply said to him and tested her own bravery by reaching out towards his face.

"Sunny," he got out between the last coughs of the spell. He grabbed her hand before it could touch him. "I'm not worth it. You're wasting your concern."

"But--"

"Listen to me. I know what you're thinking...but I'm not going to magically be cured to live a normal life. I was born to be nothing but a weapon and trained to be expendable just like one. The only reason you feel any kind of closeness to me is because I was a body to give all the affection and love you had for Hal in the months he was gone...but he's back now and he needs you. There's nothing left for me. I'm practically already dead."

Sunny blinked rapidly in semi confusion when she felt a hot flow of tears rushing forward.

"Stop telling me who I should and shouldn't worry about, Snake!"

His body violently jerked again with another coughing fit that ripped the air out of circulation in his lungs. Sunny could hear him reaching into the depths of his chest, trying to bring up the memories of the air that had filled them.

"Snake...you have to calm down!" As far as he knew, he was being calm but the air around him refused to move in the way he needed it to. His lungs crumpled like a depressurized paper bag and lost nearly all motivation to move. Sunny watched him come in and out of a twilight existence, threatening to rapidly fade out all together. She called to him but he was slipping away quicker than her voice could travel to catch up. As calmly as her situation allowed her to be, she picked up his hand in hers, closed her eyes, and placed it on her chest, letting it move with her slightly exaggerated respirations. Snake tried to keep his focus on her even as everything else swam in the enveloping darkness. The only light that remained was the one around her and he could tell it was beginning to dim, too. When she felt his pull away from her become stronger, she pressed his hand harder to her and deepened her chest's movement. Soon, Snake felt his body abruptly initiate the will to breathe again and life shoot back into every part of him almost as quickly as it had tried to leave. Sunny held onto him as he exchanged the lead in his lungs for air...and put several heartbeats and seconds between himself and death once more.

"What...what did you--"

"Snake! Thank God! Are you okay?"

"God had nothing to do with that, Sunny. What in the hell was that?!" Everything raced and verbalized faster than he could formulate the oxygen to say them. Snake didn't believe in the supernatural but he believed everything his eyes saw the little girl do...even in his weakened state. She ignored his curiosity and continued to watch him slowly come back around.

"It's not your time, Snake."

"Like hell it isn't! I should be dead right now. We both know that." he said much calmer as the rush of everything evened out, "I could feel you breathing for me, Sunny,... like you were giving me the air out of your own lungs..."

"You should sleep. You'll feel better when you wake up."

"But--"

"Rest."

With a slight brush of her hand against his face, Snake felt his eye lids suddenly become too heavy to want to stay open anymore. He used his last few moments of consciousness to think back to four months ago, lying on his deathbed and his sudden, untraceable recovery. For the first time, he questioned just who had been responsible for that.


	2. Part 2

* * *

Hal watched the light from the hallway project on the wall in front of him and then disappear a half a second later with the reclosing of his door. He felt a second body enter the room and expertly maneuver around in the darkness of it. He preferred the room that way. Dark and isolated...to match the atmosphere that had settled inside of himself. He had been fine until several nights ago when the flashbacks and the nightmares started. That was when he felt his hope to move on and forget about the whole ordeal regress greatly. Since then, he could only find enough motivation to switch sides as he lay in bed.

"Today you have to eat more that you did yesterday, Uncle Hal." The smell of fresh flowers accompanied the aroma floating from the tray of chicken noodle soup that landed on the nightstand next to him. A small hand lightly covered his shoulder. "Please look at me. I'm really worried about you."

A small bedside lamp flickered on illuminating the room with the closest thing to light it had seen in days. Hal moaned in slight annoyance but didn't move. Sunny took a seat in the computer chair across the room, accepting the back of his head to talk to instead of his face. She let a short lifetime of silence pass between them before speaking.

"I picked some more flowers for you, Uncle Hal. They're really pretty. They started to bloom on the day you came back. I like the magnolias and azaleas the best. They're so beautiful. Snake helped me pick out the azaleas." She laughed. "You should have seen him in the plant store when we went to go get them. He stuck out like a sore thumb! Everyone was looking at him really weirdly and that made me angry until I realized that he didn't care." She sighed heavily and plucked a flower out of the bouquet she had sat in the vase. "The magnolias remind me of Snake. They're pretty tough and can stand up to a lot. They were the only flowers I wasn't worried about when everything stopped growing...I knew they'd still be alive. I haven't found a flower that reminds me of you yet, Uncle Hal. Maybe when you're better, we can go to the plant store and buy some more...like we used to. Only if you want to, though." She added in the absence of a response from him. She moved to his side of the room once again and pulled down on his shoulder to flip his body on his back. He kept his head facing the wall in the opposite direction.

"I heard you last night. I was in my room but I heard you call for help while you're sleeping again. I came to check on you and talk to you until your nightmare went away. I told you that it was all going to be okay. Then, it got really bad, and you started to cry. I held your hand and promised to make you better, to make the pain go away. I'm going to do that. I'm going to be by your side, Uncle Hal, no matter what. Even if you never talk to me again."

Hal quickly wiped his eyes and looked up at the bowl on the nightstand. Sunny followed his glance.

"It's soup," she said. "You can eat that, right?"

He began to lift himself upright and Sunny slipped an arm around his back to assist him. Once he was sitting up against the headboard of his bed, Sunny presented the tray to him with a small smile that she hoped he'd return. He didn't.

"Uncle Hal, come on," she begged when he turned away his head from her as if he had suddenly changed his mind about eating. "It's not a whole lot. Just eat this and I promise I'll leave you alone." She lifted the tray to his chest so that the steam from the bowl rose directly to his face. "It's really, really good." She sang sweetly, moving the tray back and forth to lightly bump his chest.

He stiffened as if a ghost passed through him. "Please...please don't make me eat it." His voice trembled out every word.

Sunny lowered the tray and tilted her head slightly at Hal. "Are you okay?"

"Do whatever you want to me...but I'm not eating that."

"Hey, what's wrong? I'm not going to hurt you."

He shrinked back into the headboard with his arms covering his face from the impending harm he felt he was in. When she moved closer to him and reached out to touch him, he thrust her back away from him with his hands. She stumbled backwards in the loss of her balance and caught the edge of the nightstand with the side of her head before her little body connected hard with the floor. The blunt thud snapped Hal back immediately and sent his whole body into a new panic when she didn't stir after several seconds.

"Sunny?" The adrenaline in his blood pumped movement into his limbs as he dropped to his knees next to her, shaking her with more strength he thought he had left in him. "Sunny! Sunny wake up!"

Her head bounced around in the movement of his jostling her body but her eyes failed to open. Hal noticed and touched the small trickle of blood rushing from under her hair. "Angel, please get up!" He begged again right before the weight of what he'd done collapsed his body in a pile next to hers. Hal didn't hear the door open over his sobbing and only looked up when he heard Snake's voice summoning him to do so.

"What in the hell happened, Hal?!"

"I...I, I pushed her and she hit her head."

"You did what!"

"I didn't mean to! It just...happened."

Snake took the little girl's upper body into his arms. He knew she wasn't dead and that her eyes would pop open any second but the thought did nothing to control the fire building in him. He brought her body closer into his when saw Hal's hand reaching out to touch her.

"You stay away from her. I think you've done enough." He hissed at the engineer and watched him draw his hand back as if he had bitten it.

"It was an accident, Snake. I love her! I would never hurt her!"

"Then why'd you push her? She's a child!"

"I don't know what happened. She was trying to get me to eat something and I just...I just lost myself for a moment. I swear I didn't mean to hurt her. God, I swear I didn't mean it. I'm so sorry."

Snake watched him sob into his hands but stayed a complete void of empathy for the man. His only feelings was for the small body that was still motionless in his grip.

"What in the hell is wrong with you, Hal? You could have killed her. What would you have done then?"

"I don't know..."

"That's not good enough. All she's been doing in the past few weeks is try to save your ungrateful, worthless--"

They both looked down when they heard an awakening moan escape Sunny.

"Sunny?" Snake called to her. Her eyes met the mercenary's, bringing a warm smile to her face until the muffled sobbing of Hal entered her ears. She could feel the words that had been exchanged between them to make the air the way it was: thick with anger and regret. She attempted to sit up but grabbed her head in pain.

"Oww. My head..."

"You bumped it pretty hard. Just relax, okay?." Snake lightly pressed around the side of her head near her temple where a bruise were clearly beginning to form. She made a face as he pressed the area closer to her left eye but gave no hints to it hurting more than it was supposed to at the moment. "I don't think anything's too seriously injured but you're going to have a bruise there for a minute. Do you remember what happened?"

Sunny looked over at Hal, still spilling his sorrow into his hands. She wanted to tell him that it was okay, that she forgave him but the look in Snake's eyes told her she needed to answer to him first.

"I fell."

"You fell?" Snake repeated, inflecting every bit of his disbelief of her statement. "Is that all?"

She hesitated slightly and nodded. "Yeah. I lost my balance and I fell."

"It's okay, Sunny." Hal said, "Tell Snake the truth. Tell him that I'm the reason you fell."

Sunny's eyes pleaded with Snake before her words could. "It was an accident. It really was. Please don't be mad at him."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm okay, Snake. Uncle Hal," she called and looked over to him, "Please...don't cry. It's okay. I know you didn't mean it."

The words did little to bring comfort to him and his lungs exploded with more sobbing as Snake carried her out of the room and out of his sight. A few minutes passed before he could lift himself back up onto his bed. He regained a little control of the storm raging inside of him and tried to not think about Sunny and the way her body flung to the floor with the push from his own hands. He looked up and watched Snake reenter the room moments later alone, taking special care to close the door behind him.

"How...how is she?" Hal asked.

"She's going to be fine. She's resting in her room. Even now, she's more concerned about you than she is about her own self." Hal relaxed when he noticed the storm winds in Snake's own body and voice had calmed as well.

"I didn't mean--"

"I know. I know that you didn't mean to hurt her. Look, I'm really sorry about what happened to you those two months with the Resistance members...and I've been really patient with you when you tell me you don't want to talk about it but you need to start talking now, Hal."

"What do you mean?"

"You need to tell me what they did to you. Something Sunny did triggered you to react and push her in self defense."

"I...I can't."

"That's not an option. _She_ is what matters right now."

Hal almost smiled despite the situation.

"You really care about her, don't you?"

"I don't like to see any child get hurt."

"No, it's more than that. I saw the way you looked at her when you were holding her. You were scared to death. I've seen you face unnatural, unholy things in this world and I've never seen you scared."

"She...she saved my life. There aren't a whole lot of people who would have cared enough to do that."

"I know she was only trying to help me," Hal started, "the only thing she ever wants is for me to be okay. She was urging the food at me, trying to make me eat it and then, I just got this vision of being back _there_ again, having those guys shove plates into my chest telling me to eat whatever was on it. At first, I refused because I thought they had done something to it. I pushed them away from me but they'd beat me until I couldn't move and just shove it down my throat anyway. After a few weeks, I became too weak to do anything about it and I learned to eat whatever they gave me and do whatever it took so that they wouldn't kill me." He dropped his head to look at the floor. "I let them do horrible things to me, Snake...just so they'd spare my life."

Snake had heard the preview of what he was building up to in his tone. Hal began to tear up again but he feverishly wiped them away before they could fall out of disgust at himself for crying so much already.

"Like...what?" Snake asked cautiously. He felt terrible for asking but he needed the verbal confirmation for his own mind.

"They...they assaulted me. Sexually...and I let them. There was two of them and they'd take turns. They made me beg for it like I wanted it. They told me if I didn't do what they said that they'd kill me...and then you and Sunny." Tiny, gasping sobs managed to fight their way past all his attempts to hold it in, "So...I let them do whatever they wanted to me. I said whatever they wanted me to say, acted however they wanted me to act. And then one day...they just stopped. I guess they got bored with me or something. I think I must have taken a thousand showers to try and wash off the filth but...nothing made it go away. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before but..."

"It's okay, Hal." Snake seated himself next to Hal and listened to his desperate attempts to continue to wall back the emotions brewing furiously inside of him. His body trembled with the mounting pressure like a support beam destined to give away any moment. Snake pulled the lever that lowered the wall when as he put his hand on his back. "We'll deal with this," he told him, "somehow."

* * *

"So, how goes it, Snake?" Snake couldn't even muster up enough of his sense of humor to step on Mei Ling's over spirited greeted. "How's Hal doing?"

Snake made a groaning noise into the receiver of the phone.

"Hmm...that's not good." she concluded.

"Things were okay but his progress seems to be getting worse instead of better."

"Try and keep in mind that Hal has been through a lot. He's not a super soldier like you, Snake. He needs time to heal all the way around." He remembered himself saying something like that not so long ago and shook his head.

"You don't understand. He's become...a danger."

"Who could Hal possibly be a danger to?"

"Sunny..."

Mei Ling cut short a small chuckle that slipped out. "That's ridiculous, Snake. Hal would hurt himself before he'd even think about hurting Sunny."

"But he's not himself right now. He's different, darker. Something else has taken over him."

"Snake...what are you saying? He didn't actually do anything to hurt Sunny, did he?"

"It was an accident" he began and heard Mei Ling gasp, "but he had some sort of a flashback and pushed her night before last. It wasn't the push that hurt her...but she nearly took her head off on the side of a table."

"Oh my God! It wasn't too serious, was it? Is she okay?"

"Yeah, she's alright. It knocked her out for a moment...and she's got a bruise the size of Texas on the side of her head now but you know Sunny..."

"Yeah...she was probably too worried about Hal to even care."

"That's why now, I have to worry _for_ her. I have to protect her."

"He's not a monster, Snake. He made a mistake and if I know Hal, he's punishing himself for it in ways another person wouldn't dream of."

"But it's too much and I can't babysit him 24/7. The trauma goes too deep. He needs professional help."

"Well, I'm sure Rose could offer him some sort of counseling a few times a week via web cam chats or something. She's trained to deal with the effects of PTSD."

"That's not going to do it. There's nothing that can be done from here to help him."

"You almost sound like you want to send him away, Snake..."

"Just until he can work through things, Mei Ling. It's the safest way to do it."

The line was engulfed by a deafening silence. Snake knew Mei Ling wasn't speechless. She never was.

"That's the most selfish thing I've ever heard you say, Snake." she snapped.

"What?"

"Need I remind you that four months ago when you were on your deathbed, you were not the most pleasant person in the world to deal with. No one else in their right mind would have put up with your fits of verbal abuse...but Hal stuck by you and he did it without mumbling a single complaint. He cared about you...and he certainly didn't think about shipping you off to complete strangers to be taken care of!"

"This is different. Sunny was hurt in a moment of delusion."

"That's a cover up, Snake. Don't pretend that you're only looking after Sunny's best interests here. What happened was an accident. You said that yourself. Has Sunny said anything about being afraid of him now or something?

"No..."

She sighed in grave disappointment. "I can't believe you're giving up on Hal like this, Snake."

"I'm not giving up on him! I'm trying to help him."

"No. You're angry and you're trying to take the easy way out in order to not deal with this." She softened her voice. "Look, I get that you're concerned about Sunny. I really do, but think about Hal as well. If you take Sunny away from him, you won't be helping him at all. You'll be killing him."

* * *

Snake felt Sunny's presence behind him as he reached for the doorknob of the front door. They hadn't talked much since he had taken the liberty to ban Sunny from visiting Hal. She hadn't argued with him but the lack of words told him clearer than anything she could have said that she wasn't happy with the decision or with him.

"Are you going to send Uncle Hal away?"

He turned to face her, the blue and purple splotch being the first thing on her face to enter this pupils.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"I heard you talking to Mei Ling on the phone last night. Please don't send him away, Snake. He's not a bad person."

"I know and I'm not. I didn't mean that stuff I said about sending Hal away. I also didn't mean when it I said I didn't want you around him anymore. As a matter of fact," he said and placed his hands on her shoulders, "I need you more than ever to look after him, okay?"

She smiled. "Okay. I can do that."

"I'm going into town to get some supplies. I should be back shortly. Keep an eye out on him."

"But, Snake...we already have supplies. You bought them last week."

Snake smirked from the corner of his mouth. "Let me rephrase that: I'm going into town because I need cigarettes. I'll pick up some other items while I'm out to make it look like I didn't waste a trip." He ruffled the hair on top of her head in another silent apology to her before he left.

Sunny immediately redirected herself to Hal. She hadn't seen him in nearly two days since the incident. He had locked himself away in his room much to the convenience of Snake who couldn't have planted a better barrier between the two himself.

She opened his door slightly and peeped in. He appeared to her to be sleeping until he turned to her and weakly offered her a smile that brought her into the room.

"Sunny?"

"Were you sleeping, Uncle Hal? Did I wake you?"

"No. I was just...thinking is all. What are you doing in here, though? Snake will kill me if he sees you in here."

"No he won't. He's not mad at you anymore. Besides, he's not here."

Hal sat up and began running his thumb over the blue and purple bruise on her face. He hadn't seen it get so big and he felt his heart plunge and shatter inside the cavity of his chest when remembered how it had gotten there.

"It's not as bad as it looks." she said sensing the guilt overwhelming him.

"I'm so sorry I did this to you. Maybe he was right, Sunny. Maybe you shouldn't be around me anymore."

"Don't say that. I don't want that."

"You...you don't hate me, angel?"

"No! I could never hate you. I love you. Always and no matter what."

"Thank you, Sunny. I really needed to hear you say that." he caressed her face between his hands, "I promise you, I'm going to make everything right. Everything is going to change. I'm never going to hurt you again."

Sunny studied her Uncle Hal deeply in the dim lights of the room. There was an emptiness in his eyes that didn't match the tone of the words.

"Uncle Hal..."

"Do you know what I need you to do for me right now, though? I need you to go outside to your garden and pick me the biggest bouquet of flowers you can, okay?"

"But...why?"

"Because they're all in bloom now...and you can make me the bouquet that you wanted to."

"I don't want to anymore."

"Sunny...please, just do this for me," he pleaded, "I really need you to do this."

"I'll do it tomorrow. I don't want to leave you right now, Uncle Hal. You're scaring me."

He kissed her gently on her the bridge of her nose and pulled back to look at her once more. "Do it now, Sunny. For me, okay?"

Sunny moved both of her hands closer to Hal's head but he caught them in mid-air and shook his head.

"No, not this time, angel. This one is mine."

Sunny had no control over her body as she found herself leaving the room. Leaving her Uncle Hal. He mouthed "I love you" to her when she took one last look at him and then, he smiled at her. She couldn't return it. She didn't want to. Nothing he had said had given her a reason to smile. Not even the flowers.

* * *

Sunny had been hysterical when she had called his cell phone. The ability to make sentences had gotten lost in all the crying and all she could do was give key phrases.

Hal.

Locked door.

Silence.

Please hurry.

She had repeated the "please hurry" one more times than Snake could count, but no matter how much or frantically she said it, it didn't make the hour and a half drive back to the house any shorter. Even pushing ninety-seven on the more densely populated roads, the truck still went too slow for Snake's patience and he found himself being one of those drivers he usually hated that weaved in and out of cars and blindly changed into the lanes that seemed to be moving the fastest.

By the time Snake saw Sunny, she had just pounded her last fist into Hal's door before sliding down into the corner. She looked defeated and her hand throbbed for every second of the fifteen minutes it had stuck the door. Snake took his turn to pound on it, calling desperately for his friend on the other side.

Silence.

"Sunny," he knelt down in front of the little girl and got her attention by lightly jerking her by the shoulders. "Where are all the pills? All the pills I got for Hal from Rose," he repeated when she didn't respond, "Where are they?"

"I...I don't know." She was beat red and could barely catch her breath from all the crying. Snake was sure she didn't even know she was answering a question at the moment.

He stepped back and kicked the door twice and it flew open, loosing a hinge in the process. The room looked empty but it didn't feel that way. It felt potent and thick with loitering despair and chaos. Snake halted Sunny back when she tried to barge in past him.

"Stay out here."

"But--"

Snake shifted his body quicky inside the room and closed the door before she could let another word escape. He applied the lock when she hit the door in frustration. He hated the silence in the room and was thankful when he found the ticking of a clock to concentrate on. He slowly walked through the room until he found a trail of red on the floor that rushed him to the source on the other side of the bed.

It was Hal.

In the steps he took to get closer to him, the blood around him made a thick, red path that he had no choice but to walk on. This much blood couldn't be from pills alone if at all. He searched his body and quickly landed his eyes on Hal's wrists, both deeply and vertically slashed into identicalness. "Damnit, Hal...Damnit! Sunny!," he yelled to the small soul he knew was standing right outside the door, "Call 911 now!"

The door rattled impatiently against the locked knob. "What's wrong with--"

"Don't come in here! Just call for help now!"

Snake's brain placed the nearest hospital in town at nearly two hours away as soon as he heard Sunny run from the door. He begged something of Hal's body to move in his arms. He envisioned his blue eyes beaming up at him and curiously blinking him into focus just the way they had nearly two weeks earlier, the corners of his mouth pulling into a smile, and the first words out of his mouth whispering and stammering out at him. But the stillness of his body was crippling and his clammy skin sent a chilly message through him that told him everything was too late.

In all his hyper awareness, the chime of Hal's computer nearly made Snake jump out of his skin. Any other time, it would have registered as background noise but he shot a look to the direction of the computer and caught the light from the monitor dancing on the matte surface of the wall. He kept Hal's body in his arms out of a personal refusal to let go. It had been so easy to do it before, to let him go off and fight his own battles with shame and trauma in the care of strangers or 'professionals'. He had failed Hal and he knew it and found the guilt in his heart being the magnet that kept him holding him. Around the time the computer chimed again, he made himself lay his body on the floor, nearly in the same position he had found it in. He knew the second time was a definite demand for his attention.

A few lights on the hard drive blinked rapidly before a video box opened on the screen and Hal's image appeared in it. Snake landed in the chair behind him that would have easily tipped over onto the floor if he would have put any thought into actually sitting in it. He watched the recorded image of Hal's push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and move the web cam to center himself in the view. The recording was only a few hours old as Snake noticed he was wearing the same clothes that were bloodied now and somber appearance he had seen him with just hours before.

"Hi, Dave. I really hope I timed this right. I set this video to play at 7:23 PM and only once. After this play through, this file will be permanently destroyed and deleted from the hard drive." He paused and added, "I don't ever need Sunny to find this." The engineer adjusted himself in his seat for a couple of seconds and took a deep breath before looking back up at the camera. "I guess there's a lot of things I need to apologize for. Like taking the coward's way out and not saying goodbye to my best friend. I never meant to be a burden to you, Dave, and I certainly never meant to be a danger to anyone...especially Sunny. I want you to know that you had every right to want to keep me away from her. I know if Mei Ling would have seen what I did to her, I don't think she would have talked you out of sending me away."

Snake's exhale caught hard in his throat almost threatening another flair of one of his coughing spells. He had talked too loudly and too heedlessly to Mei Ling the night before into the same paper thin walls he had warned Sunny about.

"The truth is, Dave" he continued, "I should have been dead two months ago. Neither one of you should have ever seen me again. I lied and I cheated my way free of death everyday...just so that I could see Sunny again. But when I got back, the damage I thought I had left behind caught up with me. I was unrepairable...but Sunny tried her best to fix me anyway. She never gave up...but I did. I was just waiting on someone--or something--to put me out of my misery. And when I hurt Sunny...that was the blow that finally did it.

"I'm leaving my angel with you. She's been yours for a while now, actually. It's clear that she feels close to you and has grown protective of you. I know she loves me still but, I don't think she'll ever be able to look at me the same way now that she knows I can harm her. Take care of her and let her take care of you. Her saving your life wasn't an accident. There's a huge place for you in her heart and it's growing everyday." He smiled. "I think you finally know that I don't call her an angel for nothing. She's not an ordinary girl. She possesses something unexplainable, something that I think only she understands. The only thing I ask is that you don't mention to her what's in this video or that it even exists. I know it's wrong but I pray to God that her memories of me will fade as she gets older. I only want her to remember the good things about me but since I barely remember them at this point, it may not be worth it for her to even try. But, the day she becomes old enough to find out what happened, tell her..." Hal took a moment to look off camera and close his eyes to the thought lurking behind them. When he looked back up, his gaze pierced the screen with an accepted finality and control of himself even through the tears, "tell her I said this: I know you'll never understand what I've done but I hope that maybe you can learn to forgive me someday. I wanted to be the person you needed me to be—the person I was before—but I just couldn't. Instead, I caused you pain and there was no way I wanted to live knowing I had done that. I let you down and for that, more than anything...I'm so sorry, angel."

* * *

_As I mentioned above, there's notes for this story but there's a few of them so they are in my profile under "Story Notes". Hope you enjoyed this...and that you'll let me know what you think! -- Andi Mack_


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